Before that, it's only on it's first face lift at it's relatively young life, but the real remodeling has taken place under the hood.
Let's drive this 2012 Edge Limited with the little 2 Liter EcoBoost motor and check the tech.
Okay, normally, we start these videos inside the car, but the best tech story in this guy, is under the hood, because this Edge is a 2.0 Liter EcoBoost Motor.
2 Liter inline (Ford?), sitting side saddle, the kind of engine you'd expect to find in a very small car, like a Focus or something.
Not in a 2 Ton Crossover SUV.
What they've got going on here is Ford's Eco-Boost.
That's 2-key Technologies.
It's Twin Turbo Charging, so the turbo charging is optimized for different parts of the RPM band and that's an important (Achilles Heel?) to overcome with turbos, and secondly, Direct Injection.
That means, the gas (lean?) is squirted under a really high pressure right into the cylinder, right by the spark plug.
That allows the fuel to be metered precisely, you don't waste any, and to be squirted in there, or right at the moment, the detonation wants to happen.
So, you're not getting any kind of a sloppy bond.
This also allows the fuel to remain cooler, relatively, when it's in the cylinder before detonation.
This is important when they design engines because it let them have a higher compression ratio.
The ratio of which the engine, the piston, and the cylinder compress that air and fuel before it explodes.
By doing that, you get more power out of the gasoline you use.
But the trick is you tend you get spark (knot?), that detonation sound that a bad engine has.
By having the cooler fuel charge, you can get around that.
All of these adds up to 240 horsepower, 270 flick pounds of torque.
That's a big torque number out of this little mill.
It moves this 4,000 pound beast, which by the way, is about the heaviest in it's class.
Up to 60 and about 8.8 seconds.
Not bad.
We'll see how it is on the road, but the key is the MPG Number.
They get 30 highway out of this combination.
That's psychologically really important when you're marketing a car, 30's is one of those big numbers.
21 city, and as we're gonna see the combined real world average, it's quite nice.
Let's go inside first.
Okay, now the first thing on your mind is "Does this vehicle have the upgraded MyFord Touch, that will shut me up from complaining about how slow and complicated the other version is?" The answer is no.
So, I'm still gonna complain a little bit.
This is the outgoing generation of MyFord Touch.
It is just too busy and responds too slowly to touch comes in.
Ford knows, they've got a new version coming.
I've tested it out, on the Auto Show Circuit and it's much crispier.
We'll see that in a couple of months.
That said, you're also gonna notice here, a lot of touch control.
This won't be changing.
These are the kind of things that you just put your hand over.
No button actually moves.
They're capacitive, I believe.
I won't pay with this.
I don't need these kind of convenience, on something as simple and positive as climate control.
I still have a knob for temperature and maybe another one for the fan.
This just seems needlessly delicate for something that doesn't need delicacy.
It needs positive feedback and an easy grip.
So, here's this gearboxes, the only choice on the 2 Liter EcoBoost.
It's a 6th speed automatic.
Period.
Notice the gate, PRNBO, kinda going back 50 years, right?
No pedal shifters, no shiftable section, no shifting rocker on the side.
This is a very straightforward automatic transmission.
We'll see how it place out on the road.
The key to this engine is what gear you're in.
All cars these days seem to be programmed to seek top gear all the time.
It's really inferiorating, but that's one of the key ways that get MPG out of these things is to run them along at 1100 RPM when you're cruising on the freeway.
Sometimes, lower.
With this engine, because it's small displacement, and it's got a spool up to create it's power, those top gears can get in the way and make it feel really leaden, until it...
It blows up, it changes the gear or two and then off you go.
It's not turbo lag, so much as it is mode lag.
This transmission's part of the issue, it's a very standard 6th as we saw.
If it has a Sport Mode, or it's programmed a little more aggressively to hop down the gear, this car will get much snappier.
But that would probably shave off those few MPG, to separate this guy from the V6.
So, it's probably not a point to be made.
All in all, the car drives well.
It does not feel like the engine is over-matched, just needs a little thinking, but I like driving it.
Regardless, your payoff is right there on the MPG display.
I got between 23 and 24 mixed real world driving, moving 2 tons of big, tall, square metal around, with a 2 Liter (Ford?).
Okay.
Let's take this guy and dial up, seen that style.
First of all, I'm gonna go with that 2 liter Eco-Boost 4. Looks like a pig on paper, as we saw.
It drives a lot better than that in real life.
The MPG Boost over the V6 is not night and day.
You're not gonna save up to buy a house with the amount of gas you don't use, but it's an important threshold that it gets to in the real world and highway MPG.
In terms of the Cabin Tech, I'm gonna go with that 301 A-Package to get navigation, do panoramic roof, (Achilles?), the better lights, all that stuff.
But I'm not gonna do any of that until...
Let's say, early Q2 of 2012, when this guy comes out with the new MyFord Touch firmware.
That is key.
The early edition I saw, is a whole lot better, and that really makes this car, in terms of a central screen interface.
